Writing about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian Marxist

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Selling Loosies, Stealing Cigars, and Cribbing from Hamilton

The other comment I want to make concerning this
relationship between police and, let’s say, urban existence, is that you can
also see that police, the establishment of police, is absolutely inseparable
from a governmental theory and practice that is generally labeled mercantilism,
that is to say, a technique and calculation for strengthening the power of
competing European states through the development of commerce and the new vigor
given to commercial relations.- Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population

Eric Garner sold loosies.
Sold individually, priced from fifty cents to a dollar, loosies enable folks
who want to smoke but can’t afford an entire pack at once to fill their lungs. They
may also, per pack, secure to the seller a tidy profit on top of what a pack
normally goes for. Given that lots of loosie vendors are supplied with untaxed cigarettes from states like Virgina, they make a tidy profit indeed. So they’re
illegal. And so it was that cops went to
Eric Garner’s market, in part, to pick him up for selling untaxed cigarettes. He was then
murdered. We know that a black man can be killed by a cop for just about
anything—and, of course, for no reason at all—but the fact that Garner’s death
was touched off by individually-sold cigarettes struck many of us as ludicrous.
Rightfully so. Ordinary cops are rarely called upon to enforce tax laws. The US
has a host of agencies responsible for enforcing those such laws: the IRS for
income tax, US Customs and Border Protection for the taxation of trans-border
commerce, etc.Thus, even as there was something grippingly, urgently present about
Garner’s murder—the intensification of antiblack policing, the consolidation of
the New Jim Crow—there was something excessively strange about it, too, about how selling a loose, untaxed cigarette could have such consequences. Kind of anachronistic.

One might even say mercantilist.

I’ve been thinking a lot
about Eric Garner since reading Christian Parenti’s “Reading
Hamilton from the Left” today. Through a reading of Hamilton, Parenti recovers
a Founding-Dads idiom for critiquing the neoliberal withdrawal of the state
from the field of the economic. Hamilton’s work, as he puts it, “reveals the
truth that for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’ The state is the
necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for capitalism’s development. There
is no creative destruction, competition, innovation, and accumulation without
the ‘shadow socialism’ of the public sector and state planning.” And so the
remainder of the article is basically a listicle of the dope things Al
demanded, some of which he got: central banking, protective tariffs
(eventually), industrialization (such as it was), and so on. Unlike Thomas
Jefferson, who “feared the proletariat” (insofar as, well, he didn’t want to
see white Yankees proletarianized), Hamilton leaned into a pro-industrial, protectionist,
nationalist development model. And it would’ve worked, if it weren’t for those
meddling Jeffersonians. (Then Jacksonians. And then a war happened.)

Fine. Look, I get nostalgia
for mercantilism. Really truly. I’m writing a book about a bunch of West
Indians who wanted nothing more than the retention of the British mercantilist
policies, the very ones a putatively progressive Hamilton attempted to mimic in
‘Merica. (Indeed, Parenti’s article was basically published in every planter newspaper
across the British West Indies by 1854.) And I get that our neoliberal world is
so imaginatively depleted that one might have to look back to look forward,
Marx’s prolie poetry of the future be damned. But when I try joining Parenti in
looking back to Hamilton in order to look forward to a socialist future, all I
can see is a lot of folks getting killed for doing things like selling untaxed
cigarettes.

I think of Eric Garner, in
other words, because state-interventionist economic policies have always involved the police. Even in the
neoliberal world left behind when the welfare state cheesed it.

Indeed, the police sit at
the origin of all mercantilist policies. It’s what “police” meant. When Adam
Smith offered his lectures
on “justice, police, revenue and arms,”police
referred to forms of economic governance. As he puts it, “The [analytic] objects
of police are cheapness of commodities [and] public security and cleanliness.”
The police, in this sense, refers to the “policy of civil government,” or more
specifically “the regulation of inferior parts of government,” those that dealt
with material provisioning of the population. It was utterly conventional
usage, hardly unique to Smith. And so we get in Wealth of Nations: “The police must be as violent as that of
Hindostan or Egypt…which can in any particular employment, and for several
generations together, sink either the wages of labour or the profits of stock
below their natural rate.” Examples can be proliferated. Today lazy critics and
lazier supporters of neoliberalism tend to think of Smith as anti-state; he
wasn’t, or not in those terms. Indeed, when he uses the term “state,” he is
most frequently using it to describe a level in a stadial progression, or in
the diffuse sense of a politico-ethico-economic totality akin to the Hegelian Stadt. He almost never used “state” to
describe the machinery of governance. He did talk about police, though, and he
didn’t like what he saw.

Of course, the violence that
Smith is talking about in his complaint about EIC-ruled Hindostan has little to
do with the forms of embodied violence visited upon folk who couldn’t get with
the program; he’s talking about how laws, protections, tariffs, and bounties
shape markets. But the immaterial violence Smith laments always entailed
actual, physical violence against ordinary people in British South Asia, in
Egypt, in Britain, in New York. In a very simple way, all mercantilist programs
for development entailed the extension and intensification of the powers of the
fiscal-military
state. This isn’t an abstract conceptual thing; mercantilist policies
mobilized a lot of people who did a
lot of things, all for the state. Surveying land, counting bodies, collecting
taxes, inspecting ship bottoms. No statist development without police, because
it’s through surveillance and force that the state directs, in quite quotidian
fashion, value from one sphere to the next. The state doesn’t work through the
market, as a producer of value, so force latent or actual is what it has—all to
make the market work. Passes on market days to prevent glutting. Restrictions
on purchasing to prevent specie drains. Officers patrolling wharves to ensure
that goods aren’t being smuggled in tariff-free from non-treatied, driving
domestic prices down. High taxes on cigarettes to shape biopolitically
normalized bodies; cops making sure cheap smokes aren’t being sold singly.

To say “mercantilism” is to
say “police,” as Foucault suggests in what I’ve tagged above, and modern police
forces are one of the most vibrant vestiges of the era that liberals like Smith
hoped to call quits with. It’s not a huge leap from the forms of petty
peculation that West-India merchant and police theorist Patrick
Colquhoun attempted to interdict on the eighteenth-century Thames—theft
that both diminished private profit and state revenue—and that the NYPD
attempted to interdict on Staten Island. The gallows
at Tyburn or transportation for the former; extra-judicial murder for the
latter. (Tobacco remains a constant.)

My point, of course, isn’t
that liberal critiques of “the mercantile system” were somehow anti-police.
They weren’t, and they haven’t been. Smith’s theory of value was first
articulated in the sections of his lectures on police, and the liberal value
theory it originated basically attempted to calibrate British forms of
policing, making them adequate to what all those Scottish guys thought of as a
commercial society. We know, too, that neoliberal
economic policy in practice requires the mass policing and incarceration of
people, most of whom are of color. Indeed, the opposition between neoliberal
and statist economics is best viewed not as an abstract conflict of doctrine,
but as opposing strategies deployed by different states in different constellations
of and from different positions within the world-system. This was Friedrich
List’s point, whom Parenti wants to recover but for all the wrong reasons. (You
might get the impression, from the article, that Marx and List were somehow on
the same page. They weren’t. The latter hated the former, and was an
anti-anti-free-trader to boot.) The analytic assumption underlying all of List’s
arguments is that all markets are products of (nation-)state policy. Whether
free-market or mercantilist, whether derived from the Manchester School or
aligned with the American System, the state is right there—after all, it’s the
state that “mercantilist” or “free-trade” would grammatically predicate.
Indeed, List’s critique of Smith wasn’t that the latter was methodologically
individualistic, as Parenti suggests, but that the free-trade tenets of British
political economy were simply the form that mercantilist practices took for the
hegemon of the world-system. Free-trade Britain was just the global cop, and
they have a roster of small wars throughout the Pax Britannica to prove it.

The “state” versus
“anti-state” economic binary, in other words, is a false binary, and the
primary subject that unifies these seemingly opposed parts is the police. From
the petty smugglers hanged to prevent poorer folk from enjoying a bit of baccy
in the heyday of mercantilism, to the black bodega owner killed in part because
he sold loosies in the era of antiblack neoliberal penality, the most basic,
transhistorical, and violent agent of state economic development has been the
police.

What’s weird to me about the
Parenti article is that, ultimately, I think he gets that. As he put it in a
line I’ve already quoted: “for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’” But
he does so only to conclude: “Like Hamilton, we face a profound crisis rooted
in an economy that demands to be remade.” But why indeed would we
want to remake the economy at this moment, which would necessitate remaking the
state, when we might call quits with both?

This question becomes all
the sharper when we consider what we’ve seen of the state in the midst of being
“remade” over the past few weeks—the murder of Eric Garner, yes, and then the
murder of Michael Brown. It can’t be forgotten that, when the rebellion in
Ferguson set off, it was small business owners who demanded the saturation of
the area with police—small capital demanding the state to reappear in what
might have been a neoliberal, post-state paradise. And then, when a harassed
police department attempted to produce post mortem justification for the murder
of Brown, they reached about in the grab bag of mercantilist ideological
material.